Daily Archives: 2020-04-08

Article note: Oh, not this shit again.
KDE has been _amazing_ for the last few years, but dumb license games with Qt has been a major problem for FOSS GUI environments for over 20 years now (It's basically how we ended up with GTK and a major ecosystem split).

There’s a storm brewing in the world of Qt and KDE, as the parent company of Qt, The Qt Company, is contemplating restricting new Qt releases to paying customers (i.e., not releasing them as open source) for twelve months. This obviously affects the KDE project considerably, who have been negotiating with The Qt Company for years now.

They announced that LTS releases of Qt will only be available for paid license holders. It is still unclear what this implies for contributions to Qt and for the sharing of security fixes between the various parties (including The Qt Company, the many Qt experts contributing, the KDE community, and Linux distributions).

It seemed the two parties were working on a path forward acceptable to all parties involved, but then came the announcement earlier today that The Qt Company was contemplating restricting all releases to paid customers for twelve months. It seems bad blood has been brewing for a while, as Schmidt-Wischhöfer states:

The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead.

All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. We will continue to work on a contract update that helps all sides. But even if these negotiations were to be unilaterally stopped by The Qt Company, Qt will stay Open Source, and KDE will be able to use it. I am also absolutely sure that the Qt + KDE communities will continue cooperation on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes, even should The Qt Company decide to forgo the benefits of cooperation.

Luckily for the future of KDE and Qt, there is an agreement in place between KDE and The Qt Company that states that “[…] should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.”

This is a serious issue that I hope can be resolved, as nobody will benefit from a serious rift between The Qt Company and the KDE project.

Article note: Aw shit.
The US presidential election is going to be two obviously sunsetting, touchy, racist old uncle stereotypes having a slap-fight in a nursing home.
I wasn't optimistic about the DNC's ability to win with Biden _before_ the Republican's efforts to run a shock-doctrine takeover.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is out of the 2020 presidential race.

The Vermont senator announced in a call with his staff on Wednesday he's suspending his campaign for president, CNN reports. This leaves former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic party's presumed 2020 presidential nominee.

Biden had maintained his lead over Sanders in the delegate count over the past few weeks after his impressive showings in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, and after suffering another series of primary losses to Biden last month, Sanders admitted he was "losing the debate over electability" to the former vice president.

This news comes after The Washington Post reported that some of Sanders' top aides, including his campaign manager, were urging him to consider dropping out of the race. Sanders is set to speak to supporters in a live stream shortly.

Article note: This is sad, the corpse of DEC (and also IBM) really should be making their platforms as accessible as possible for hobbyists, students, historians, etc. and they're headed in the opposite direction.
There are good lessons to be learned from playing with weird platforms, and some of those lessons turn into future professional usage.
This especially sucks for folks keeping historical VAX systems running, it sounds like VSI might get their shit together for a new program for Alpha and Itanium but no indications they'll even try for VAX.

Article note: I ran into that the other week.
Get a UVC industrial camera with a M12 or CS mount lens to use as a webcam, it's a better camera than the "webcam" models and not everyone has noticed UVC cameras _are_ webcams so the prices are normal.
I grabbed one with an OV2710 sensor (does 1920x1080@30fps, 1280×720@60, and so on) and a 2.8-12mm CS lens for $65 that took a little over a week to arrive (I paid a slight premium from Amazon instead of Aliexpress because it looked like there was US stock... turned out to be the same seller shipping from the same place in China. Oh well).
I'm trying to limp the hands-on portion of some sophomore-level EE courses to the end of the semester, so I've got mine mounted as an overhead camera for drawing/demonstrating/etc. the crap laptop built-in is plenty for facecam.
The major problem is getting the video conferencing apps not to drop cameras to super-low quality, Zoom usually won't even use the full resolution mode of my built-in (except occasionally and apparently at random it decides to and changes the frame by selecting a 16x9 mode instead of the 4:3 it usually picks), and offers no real camera settings that I can find.